Two murals on a bridge over Route 95 make the overpass look like it was built of boulders. Something about the color, however, gives away that they’re not real rocks.

Two murals on a bridge over Route 95 make the overpass look like it was built of boulders.

Something about the color, however, gives away that they’re not real rocks.

What playful spirit would paint murals of rocks in a state filled with rocks?

The bridge before this one, in fact, is faced in quarried stone.

Jonathan Stevens, director of special projects for Governor Chafee, likes the serial effect of the first bridge being real stone and the second a “trompe l’oeil.”

The painted bridge carries Woodville Road over the interstate, and to northbound traffic, the mural on the right presents something much more playful than just faux boulders. Peering out from the rocks is a pair of surprised eyes and a few green elves. One elf brazenly suns himself in full view.

You might go by that bridge without noticing that the rocks are a mural. Or you might pass with a smile without ever noticing the elves. But after you see them once, you see them every time.

The mural, Stevens said, is by David Macaulay, the famous author and illustrator of “The Way Things Work.” He also designed the mural on the Shippeetown Road overpass, in East Greenwich/West Warwick, visible to northbound traffic between exits 7 and 8. In that mural, gnomes peek out from behind purple curtains as if from the windows of their homes.

Macaulay also did a mural in Providence, on an elbow of Jefferson Street between the Orms and Smith streets overpasses. On the right, for southbound traffic, it’s another trick played on the eyes — alcoves housing statues on pedestals, a pigeon perching on each head. In one alcove, a dog seems to have jumped onto an empty pedestal.

And there are other murals, too, on Rhode Island interstates: by Gretchen Dow Simpson on Route 95 in Pawtucket (detail of a factory) and by Anthony Russo on Route 195 in East Providence (sailboats). Both are illustrators whose fame extends beyond the state’s borders.

Stevens, who helped shepherd the projects, said this about the South County gateway to Rhode Island: “We wanted to have an image, in contrast with the America’s Cup theme, and the Blackstone Valley Heritage Park theme, by having a stone wall.” He hoped it would “be a commemoration and homage to the native aboriginals and the earliest European residents.” Stone walls were some of the earliest structures, or what he calls architectural features of the land.

Johan Bjurman, of North Providence, who with Ying Kue painted the Hopkinton bridge, calls the two sides of that mural “the fieldstone walls of rocks.”

Others prepared the abutment surface to accept the paint and erected the staging and hung the material that screened them from view while they painted. They worked for E.F. O’Donnell, he said, which did the organizing, prep and paperwork. Bjurman says he felt like “the guy that puts the icing on the cake. In reality, there’re so many other hands.”

He said they used “a very high-grade paint that would last for, like, eons.” And each mural got an anti-graffiti coating to help protect it.

Bjurman, who started out as a sign painter and pictorial artist for outdoor advertising, said they used the grid method of transferring the original drawing to the full-size bridge. Even though the subject was rocks, he was careful to render exactly what Macaulay had drawn. He said he learned early in his career to do what he is asked to do, rather than what his inner artist wants.

“Put the beret on the hook,” he calls it.

What does Bjurman hope people think when they’re driving by?

“I hope they think that they have entered into a state that has some interesting aspects to it.”